One of the closing scenes in the movie, Crash, when the mother says to the older son, as they wait to receive the body of her younger son, his brother, "I already know who killed him. You did. You never had any time for us." And then as he was leaving because he couldn't keep the tears back, she said, "You know he visited me when I was asleep. He brought me groceries." What she didn't know was that she was so drunk that she failed to see it was really her elder son who came back to help her, not her younger one who had died....and had abandoned her long before. But love is blind.

I have been thinking about this question and thought that I might answer it with one of the final scenes from Kirasawa's Seven Samurai.

These two old Ronan who have been hired to protect this village from bandits at the beginning of the film tell each other that maybe this time by taking the job they will find the glorious death they seek. The end of a fierce battle finds them alive and one of them turns to the other and says with much sadness:

curly lambeau wrote:The Soviet WWII film "Come and See" (1985). Pretty much every single scene qualifies for this thread. It's on a much higher intensity level than Full Metal Jacket ,Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now, etc. I can't think of anything else that comes close to it.

I just finished a book about the Russian soldiers experience in WW11 called "Ivans War". Not only was it horrific for what they had to go through against the Germans but also how Stalins government treated them. I have a number of Russian friends that verified their treatment. I had no idea 7,000,000 soldiers died and 20,000,000 civilians perished. Mindboggling numbers. This movie sounds awesome.

Just remembered something you might be interested in. If you haven't seen the British documentary on WWII, "The World at War," I'm sure you'd want to. It came out in the early '70s, some 26 parts, focusing on the human tragedies and narrated with perfect understatement by Laurence Olivier. I first saw it in the late '70s and that's where I first learned of the Russian death toll (I remember Olivier saying 22 million) though reports on the numbers still do vary.

curly lambeau wrote:The Soviet WWII film "Come and See" (1985). Pretty much every single scene qualifies for this thread. It's on a much higher intensity level than Full Metal Jacket ,Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now, etc. I can't think of anything else that comes close to it.

I just finished a book about the Russian soldiers experience in WW11 called "Ivans War". Not only was it horrific for what they had to go through against the Germans but also how Stalins government treated them. I have a number of Russian friends that verified their treatment. I had no idea 7,000,000 soldiers died and 20,000,000 civilians perished. Mindboggling numbers. This movie sounds awesome.

Just remembered something you might be interested in. If you haven't seen the British documentary on WWII, "The World at War," I'm sure you'd want to. It came out in the early '70s, some 26 parts, focusing on the human tragedies and narrated with perfect understatement by Laurence Olivier. I first saw it in the late '70s and that's where I first learned of the Russian death toll (I remember Olivier saying 22 million) though reports on the numbers still do vary.

Yes i remember the series well. Oliviers voice and that terrific music are still imprinted in my brain. I got those fatality numbers from reading "Ivans War". The author went on to state that the entire Russian army that existed in 1941, when the Germans first attacked, was completely wiped out and by the end of the war their forces were populated by an entirely new group of soldiers. Of further note. We lost just under 400,000 men in the entire war while the one battle for Berlin took 300,000 of their soldiers. The slaughter was on an unimaginable scale. Thanks for the feedback.